Expert Insight: Sensitive high-throughput plasma proteomics: Key technology for deep phenotyping

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Christopher Lausted, ISB Senior Research Engineer, Dale Yuzuki, Director of Digital and Strategic Marketing Communications at Olink Proteomics, and Dr. Anne Hammerstein, Product Manager at SPT Labtech

Identifying early markers of transitions between human health and disease is a key objective of systems medicine. The strategy involves collecting diverse longitudinal data for each individual, before and after symptoms manifest. This deep phenotyping is made possible by a range of technologies, including proteomics. However, until recently, a rate-limiting step was the collection of comprehensive plasma proteomics.

In this free on-demand SelectScience^® webinar, join Christopher Lausted, ISB Senior Research Engineer, Dale Yuzuki, Director of Digital and Strategic Marketing Communications at Olink Proteomics, and Dr. Anne Hammerstein, Product Manager at SPT Labtech, to learn how this bottleneck has been removed using high-throughput and high-sensitivity protein profiling with Olink^® technology coupled with SPT Labtech’s liquid handling automation.

Key learning objectives

• Learn how longitudinal deep phenotyping, including plasma proteomics, is central to systems medicine, the study of complex disease, and biomarker discovery
• Find out the importance of establishing baseline measurements and reference ranges for normal human plasma, which can also signal outliers in undiagnosed disease
• Discover how potential prognostic markers of severe and ‘long’ COVID-19 were identified in the plasma proteome
• Learn how adopting an Olink and SPT Labtech bundled infrastructure can deliver high throughput and uncompromised data quality for genomics, single cell, RNA seq, and much more

Read on for highlights from the live Q&A session, or watch the webinar on demand, at a time that suits you. 

Are there stored samples, and will you go back and now use the existing bigger Olink Explore panel?

CL: As the number of assays has increased dramatically since we did this work, yes, we will go back and use the existing Olink Explore panel, that's one of the reasons we've implemented Olink Explore 3000.

For a 96-plex panel, can the kits be customized? And, if certain conditions are producing different protein isoforms, could these be differentially detected?

DY: The Olink antibodies that are used in the detection method are not sensitive to different kinds of post-translational modifications, as well as even alternative splice variants that proteins can exhibit. That's part of sort of our careful validation of measuring exactly the target that we believe we measure.

If there needs to be any customization, you're able to go down to a 15- or 21-Plex panel to look at a larger number of samples in an easier-to-use fashion.

CL: In my slides, I showed selected profiles from some cancer cases, where we looked at many different types of transitions. Some things change with diets, a lot of inflammation markers change where a person may have had a cold during the blood draw. That was one reason we wanted to see three consecutive out-of-range measurements before we drew the volunteers' attention to it.

What is the role of dragonfly^® and mosquito^® in this workflow?

AH: They're integral to the workflow. The Olink Explore platform is validated for use with the mosquito and the dragonfly. The mosquito is used to add the samples and the dragonfly to add reagents.

As I mentioned in the slides, getting that low volume, precision, and accuracy is absolutely critical in generating high-quality data. It's a tool that enables, but it's also the only validated choice there.

DY: It is the critical capability of mosquito for low volume at high numbers. By that, I mean low volume in terms of the sub-microliter volumes in 384-well plates and that was what was used in the PCR setup, as well as the incubation with the antibodies. Naturally, antibodies are what is the most expensive part of sort of the assay.

CL: The dynamic duo are able to dispense a lot of samples quickly and carry out non-contact dispensing of reagents, it's useful for all sorts of things.

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